The National Air and Space Museum Film Archives, part of the Archives Division at the National Air and Space Museum,

Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...

, holds over 20,000 films documenting the history of

aviation Aviation includes the activities surrounding mechanical flight and the aircraft industry. ''Aircraft'' includes fixed-wing and rotary-wing types, morphable wings, wing-less lifting bodies, as well as lighter-than-air craft such as hot a ...

and

space flight Spaceflight (or space flight) is an application of astronautics to fly spacecraft into or through outer space, either with or without humans on board. Most spaceflight is uncrewed and conducted mainly with spacecraft such as satellites in ...

. The Film Archives is located at the

Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, also called the Udvar-Hazy Center, is the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM)'s annex at Washington Dulles International Airport in the Chantilly area of Fairfax County, Virginia. It holds numerous ...

Chantilly, Virginia Chantilly is a census-designated place (CDP) in western Fairfax County, Virginia, Fairfax County, Virginia. The population was 24,301 as of the 2020 census. Chantilly is named after an early-19th-century mansion and farm, which in turn took the ...

, where it moved in 2011 from its previous location in the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) building on the National Mall. The collections are available for research, though requests must be made in advance. NASM Film Archives' collections range from the early days of flight to space exploration. Totaling more than 700,000 feet of motion picture film as well as videotape, the collections include edited

documentaries A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in term ...

, instructional films, promotional films, home movies, interviews and

outtakes An outtake is a portion of a work (usually a film or music recording) that is removed in the editing process and not included in the work's final, publicly released version. In the digital era, significant outtakes have been appended to CD and D ...

. The earliest item in the collection is a 1909

test flight Flight testing is a branch of aeronautical engineering that develops specialist equipment required for testing aircraft behaviour and systems. Instrumentation systems are developed using proprietary transducers and data acquisition systems. D ...

of the Wright Military Flyers at Ft. Myer, Virginia. The collections include: * Keystone Aircraft Corporation Collection (1926–34) * Seymour Collection (1926–34) * Lewis E. Reisner Collection (1929–38) * World Trip Collection (1935–36) *''We Saw It Happen'' (1953)

External links

National Air and Space Museum Film Archive WebsiteNational Film Preservation Foundation

References

{{Reflist Film archives in the United States Smithsonian Institution History of aviation